Construction sites have always been a chaotic workplace. The multitude of supplies being delivered, personnel coming and going, and resulting equipment and vehicles which frequent and then leave such job sites, making it inherently hard to keep track all of the people and tools and equipment visiting and leaving the site. Additionally, because workers tend to move from position to position on large sites, and change tools depending on the task at hand, it can makes it difficult for tool owner's to keep track of their very expensive professional power tools.
Additionally, the power tool market is dominated by a small handful of companies which in their quest to maintain their brand identification, tend to make the tools sold, look identical when viewed close-up, let alone when viewed from a distance. Because of the small number of manufacturers for professional as well as non-professional power tools, and their noted visual similarity, the potential for two people on the same job site, owning identical looking tools is very high. With the similarity in ornamental appearance, even two individuals viewing their respective tools close-up, can have trouble identifying their respective tool if they are both the same brand of tool.
Methods of tool identification exist, but still allow for some ambiguity. Name tags might be glued on individual tools but easily fall off in the tough construction environment. Painting tools has been a known manner of customizing the ornamental aspects to aid in identification, however paint easily wears off and can damage the mechanical and electrical components of tools if applied improperly.
While individual tools owned by individual workers might be engraved or marked somehow to make them identifiable as owned by a certain worker, from a distance such tags and engraving cannot be seen. Consequently, it is virtually impossible to identify an individual tool by ownership from two tools of the same brand and color scheme, from a distance. This problem only increases on a job site where a large contractor may be supplying power tools for their workers use which are owned by the contractor. With the tools of the same brand, as noted above, being substantially identical in ornamental aspects, it can be hard to tell the difference between an individual owner's tools, and those owned by the contractor.
As a consequence, the threat of job site theft of power tools is ever present and is on the rise. While construction sites have always been exposed to the threat of theft and vandalism at night, tool theft during working hours is becoming an increasingly annoying nuisance for laborers and contractors alike. In fact, tool theft has become so common in some areas that contractors have begun to factor in stolen tools as a cost of business in each contract.
Often the culprits are fellow workers or employees of the contractor supplying power tools, who simply walk away with tools that don't belong to them. With the ornamental commonalities between makes and models, and the fact that from a distance most power tools look quite similar, it is exceedingly hard to ascertain if tools are in the possession of unauthorized users or being stolen by people leaving a job site. One may even watch a thief walk away with one's drill and not think twice because “they all pretty much look the same anyway.”
Methods of tool security exist, however most are in the forms of overnight secure storage. Currently there is no means to addresses the problem of tool theft during working hours since a person leaving with a tool, from a distance, cannot be identified as being in the possession of a tool they do not own. Few, if any workers, want to yell at someone leaving a job site and accuse them of stealing based on viewing the tool from 100 feet away or more. Such an accusation could be very embarrassing at the least, if incorrectly asserted.
As noted above, there are labeling and engraving markings that may be done to tools to match them to the owner. However such markings and engravings are generally not easily viewed from close up, to say nothing of twenty yards away.
Thus, there is an unmet need for a method of tool identification which renders ownership of a tool ascertainable from a distance where labels and markings cannot be read. Such an apparatus and method should allow individual users to ornamentally mark their tools so they can discern their ownership from a distance. Such a method and apparatus should allow owners of large amounts of such tools to mark them all in an ornamentally viewable fashion to make them easily identifiable from a distance. Further, such a system, if employed with many contractors and firms owning large numbers of tools, should be easily customizable to provide a visually recognizable means to identify tools owned by each such firm, even on the same job site.
Finally, such a system and apparatus should employ a tracking element that is geospatially conscious of which owner is located and where to avoid ornamental configurations for users who are proximate and could become confused.
In this respect, before explaining at least one embodiment of the method and apparatus of the disclosed tool identification method and apparatus in detail, it is to be understood that the invention is not limited in its application to the details of construction and to the arrangement of the components set forth in the following description or illustrated in the drawings nor the steps outlined in the specification. The invention is capable of other embodiments and of being practiced and carried out in various ways as those skilled in the art will readily ascertain just from reading this application. Also, it is to be understood that the phraseology and terminology employed herein are for the purpose of description and should not be regarded as limiting.
As such, those skilled in the art will appreciate that the conception upon which this disclosure is based may readily be utilized as a basis for designing other methods and systems for carrying out the ornamental identification system herein and the several purposes of the present intention. It is important, therefore, that the claims be regarded as including such equivalent construction and method of operation insofar as they do not depart from the spirit and scope of the present invention.